The Tillers
This patch finally added and unlocked the Tillers questline. First up, we have the introductory quests that demonstrate a few basic farming tasks, and tell you about Farmer Yoon's background. He is new to farming and wants to prove himself, so he needs your help!

Scallion Seeds can be purchased from Merchant Greenfield at Halfhill Market. After tilling and tending your plant, you must wait until the next day to harvest ripe Scallions.

The Tillers + Gina Mudclaw

1400 + 6000

Planting Seeds

Now let's take a look at a few outcomes of planting seeds. After you get your plants to a growing state, you have to come back after the daily quest reset to gather your crop. If the mechanic for fixing a problem with your plant isn't obvious, you can check with Yoon and he will give you some instructions.

Your First Vote

As fun as watching questing is, let's take a quicker look at what happens after your first crops grow and you earn a vote!

Originally Posted by MMO-Champion

Gina Mudclaw says: Come walk with me, Chaud. I would like to pay Farmer Yoon a visit.Gina Mudclaw says: You know, you sure saved my hide with those scallions.Gina Mudclaw says: Cooks are always looking for fresh vegetables. Anything you grow on your farm, you can use for cooking or sell to other cooks.Gina Mudclaw says: Talk to any of the Ironpaws at the market if you want to improve your own cooking skill.Gina Mudclaw says: Hey Farmer Yoon!Farmer Yoon says: Hey Gina! Didn't expect a visit from you.Gina Mudclaw says: Listen, since you two did such a good turn by helping me out, I'm casting the first vote to help you join the Tillers.Gina Mudclaw says: There are four other votes you'll need to get, but that'll come in time.Gina Mudclaw says: Settle yourselves in and come by the market any day if you are looking for work.Gina Mudclaw says: Welcome to The Heartland!

Further Votes

After you have earned your first vote, you can check your relationship status with all of the Tillers at the Tiller's Shrine. Gina will tell you more about gifts that you can give to the other members to increase your Friendship level as well as where they are located. These gifts are BoP items that are found in piles of soil around the world.

After your first success at growing something, Farmer Yoon isn't satisfied with his four small clumps of dirt, and has you ask Gai Lan for some help clearing out the weeds. There are a few more Growing the Farm quests that come after that, likely opening some more dirt plots for you to plant in.

We have talked about Jogu before, but this time you are introduced to him and help him out with a little bit of Apple Hooch! He is still more than happy to sell you a tip for 10 gold about tomorrow's crop, which likely will yield more than anything else you plant.

Obtain 8 of Yoon's Apples and 50 of Yoon's Craneberries, then bring them to Bobo Ironpaw to brew into Apple-Berry Hooch.

Jogu the Drunk + The Tillers

250

Daily Quests

There are a number of daily quests that will reward general Tiller reputation, as well as friendship reputation with each of the Tiller NPCs. You can see all of the quests that reward Tiller's reputation on WoWDB!

Plant Witchberries in Sunsong Ranch. You can purchase seeds from Merchant Greenfield in the Halfhill Market.

The Tillers

250

Further Friendship

Each of the NPCs that you can become friends with have some quests that do not reward Tiller's rep, but will help you to become better friends faster. You can find the list of these quests on WoWDB. Upon becoming better friends with the NPCs, they will mail you drinks, seeds, and a few items like the Straw Hat and Red Cricket!

Is it intended that secondary stats now have twice the itemization budget of primary stats in terms of gems
Yes. With the possible exception of Spirit, there is little decision in choosing red gems in the live game. Secondary stats are often more interesting in general because there are break points, hard caps, and personal preferences. Any Agi user who eschews Agi is doing it wrong.

Let me throw some numbers at you
Sadly those aren't the kind of numbers that support compelling arguments. Classes can be overpowered with only a few abilities or have dozens and still be underpowered. If there are situations where you feel helpless, let us know. If you disagree with a design direction, let us know that too (though this thread is not the right one for that).

We understand not every player has the ability and/or inclination to come up with numbers such as healing per second or the effectiveness of cooldowns. But this one thread is for those who can. It has been enormously beneficial in helping us catch bugs or design problems as well as helping players calibrate their sims and spreadsheets. Please help us keep the signal to noise ratio strong.

This point is directed the blues (and no one else)
Sorry, these are public forums. We like and encourage players to talk to each other. The echo chamber effect is strong in our forums, so we think it's actually very healthy when players can disagree with you, provided they can do so in a constructive manner. If someone's just trolling you, ignore them and we'll take care of it. But someone disagreeing with you is not the same as trolling.

Druid (Forums) / Monk (Forums)
To provide an update on tanking mechanics, I want to comment on Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters. This is somewhat of an over-generalization, but tanks typically care about 4 things when gearing in decreasing order of importance:

#4 is generally much less important than #1-3, and overlaps with #3 heavily when considering gear. And #3 is relatively easy these days anyway. So, usually it just comes down to #1 and #2.

Stamina primarily helps with #1. Dodge primarily helps with #2. Most other stats help with resource generation, which typically translate into #2. Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters is in the somewhat unusual place of helping with both #1 and #2 significantly.

If you compare Mastery to Dodge for a Brewmaster, as a few theorycrafters here have done, you can see that, purely in terms of how much they reduce your damage taken, Dodge wins by a considerable margin. We balanced it that way, because we give value to how much it helps with #1 as well. Obviously, helping with #1 has some value, because you care about Stamina. We see Mastery for Guardians and Brewmasters as sort of a hybrid between Stamina and Avoidance, in terms of how it helps improve your character.

It’s easy to objectively compare the value of two stats in terms of how much they help with #1, or how much they help with #2. But comparing some amount of help with #1 to some amount of help with #2 is much more complex and subjective. It’s an interesting choice that tanks have to make all the time, and one of the most successful choices in gearing that the game provides (Stamina vs. Avoidance being the primary way that choice is expressed). So, that means balancing a stat that provides a mix of both can be complex and subjective as well. After much deliberation, we’re going to try valuing the effective health benefits of Mastery for Brewmasters and Guardians significantly lower than the damage reduction benefits, and adjusting the Mastery conversion rates to reflect that.

Hopefully this provides a bit of background and perspective about the complexities underlying even the simplest of changes: In the next build, you’ll find Mastery for Guardians providing 1.25% Armor per Mastery (up from 0.65%), and for Brewmasters providing 0.5% Stagger per Mastery (up from 0.3%).

Hunter (Forums)While doing hunter ability testing I noticed that Wild Quiver looks to be doing only about half the damage of an autoshot (possibly a bit less). Historically Wild Quiver has been roughly the same damage as autoshot. Was this changed deliberately or is it a bug?
Yes, Wild Quiver does 50% weapon damage now, but we’ve increased the proc rate substantially to compensate. Also, the next build you get should include a significant number of changes to hunter ability damage, so it’s probably best to wait until then for really detailed investigation of their damage formulae. Super brief and incomplete summary of changes include nearly doubling Wild Quiver’s proc chance; doubling the damage of the level 90 talents; buffing BM’s Mastery considerably; Master Marksman reduced to 3 stacks; doubling the damage of Black Arrow and Serpent Sting for Survival; significantly nerfing Beast Cleave; nearly halving the cost of Explosive Shot; buffing Aimed, Arcane, and Chimera Shot noticeably; nerfing Cobra shot noticeably; nearly doubling the damage of Kill Command; reducing the cost of Arcane Shot; nerfing Focus Fire and Frenzy somewhat… There have been a lot of changes to Hunter damage.

Shaman (Forums)My question is, how is this talent intended to work? How much is the heal supposed to be? 25% of base maximum (which would be 20% of new maximum)? 25% of new maximum? Are health percentages supposed to remain constant through its effect? Where does this 15% come from?
We weren't able to reproduce the results you mention, but this is the intended functionality of Nature's Guardian: When it is triggered, 25% of your current maximum health is calculated. Your current and maximum health is then increased by this value. When it wears off, it reduces your current and max health by that value. It should never actually kill you, but it can reduce your current health to 1.

Is it intended for Healing Stream and Healing Tide to not benefit from mastery on the first ticks or is it just a technical limitation from totems? If so does this mean that crit does not benefit on first tick either for HTT(Have yet to see it but didn't do extensive testing on it).
Fixed for next build. It also dynamically adjusts with your mastery instead of snapshotting it.

Speaking of ICDs and Enhancement, could you clarify how Windfury is working for MoP?

Historically, Windfury has had a 3 second ICD between procs with a shared lockout between hands. It would also proc from white hits along with Stormstrike and Lava Lash. So my questions are this:

1) Is the 3 second ICD still the plan for MoP. I just did some initial testing against a training dummy, and that still seems to be the case.
2) Is the ICD still supposed to be shared between both hands for MoP?
3) Is this ICD a fixed 3 second ICD for MoP, or is it effected by Haste at all?
4) Is Windfury supposed to proc from Stormstrike and Lava Lash? From my testing, I didn't see a single proc when just isolating Stormstrike and Lava Lash attacks. On Live, I'm seeing both yellow attacks proc Windfury. I'm assuming this is just a bug, but I want to confirm if this is by design for MoP
Windfury should be mostly the same as on live. 1) Yes. 2) Yes. 3) Fixed. 4) White attacks and Wind Lash only. Other than adding Wind Lash to being able to proc it, it doesn’t look like it’s changed in quite a while; are you sure that yellow attacks trigger it on live? (Easy way to test just yellow attacks: Turn 90degrees away from a target dummy. White attacks won’t hit, but yellow attacks can, at exactly 90degrees).

- Do you meet #1?
- If yes, then any further value in this category is 0.
- If no, then get more stuff that increases your #1 value (primarily Stamina).
It’s not that simple though. Meeting #1 is somewhat binary, like you describe, somewhat not. If you beat an encounter without dying, obviously you had enough effective health. But more effective health would still be useful; it’s definitely not without value. Healers can use slower, more efficient heals on you if you have more of a health cushion. You can tank more mobs at a time. You also may have gotten lucky with avoidance, and never took a special attack and an undodged auto attack at the same time, or perhaps never got 5 undodged hits in a row. Every pull is different. There are definitely diminishing returns on the value of more effective health, but it doesn’t instantly diminish to 0 at some magical ‘enough’ point.

Warlock (Forums)I was looking at the warlock changes in the upcoming beta build and noticed a few things. Why are you nerfing affliction so much? I agree it needed a nerf, but so much that it will go below the other 2 specs by a large amount?

Not to mention destroying a glyph and adding a new ability that kills clipping. People will just ignore the glyph and Pandemic and just refresh dots right after they fall off to do max dps. Clipping with or without the glyph is useless now, but with the glyph it's like nerfing yourself. Drain Soul is barley better than MG under 20% today, now with it getting a HUGE nerf it will be completely useless as an execute.
We encourage you to try out the changes and see what has changed rather than relying on information that has been datamined. To help further explain, we’ll briefly summarize what has changed with Affliction damage.

We noticed (thanks to the community interaction in this thread) that the Everlasting Affliction glyph was providing a huge DPS increase, but as we’ve said, we don’t want huge DPS increases to come from glyphs. Instead of simply nerfing the glyph, we baked the benefits that the glyph provided into the entire class via Pandemic, a level 90 passive ability, and changed the glyph to something completely different. We also changed the design of Malefic Grasp to, hopefully, make the ability more reliable and simple; our intention was not to nerf it. It’s important to note that we reduced the base period of Unstable Affliction and Corruption from 3 seconds to 2 seconds, so both Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul should give you the same additional DoT damage now as they did before.

One other clarification about the warlock changes: Drain Soul still deals double damage under 20%. It being missing from the new tooltip is just a tooltip error and has been corrected for the next build.

Now onto what some others have brought up. Does the MG/DS under 20% effect count as the dots themselves ticking? Considering how that would nerf shard regen if not, I personally believe it does. Since I can't test it yet, some clarification would be wonderful.
Yes. In all ways, the additional ticks of the DoTs provided by MG/DS should function as additional ticks of the respective DoTs. For example, the extra Corruption ticks that occur (for 50% damage) from MG are able to proc Nightfall. This means that you’re actually getting *more* Corruption ticks than before, so we reduced the proc chance per tick of Nightfall to compensate; you should get the same number of Nightfall procs per time as before.

The Malefic Grasp mechanic change should not be a nerf at all. However, the 25% nerf to most Affliction-specific abilities should amount to a ~20% (very ballpark number, don’t hold us to that number if you model it as 21.8% or something) nerf. This is indeed a rather extreme amount, because they really were that extremely overpowered. We had been balancing them previously based on not having that glyph (and so when I said that we were seeing Affliction only a little ahead of Destruction, that was based on Affliction not having that glyph).

My personal testing on target dummies and every sim i've seen is now hoping Affliction at the bottom of the warlock heap
Any sources for this so we have something to actually go on? As we said above, Affliction damage was too high. Not every damage adjustment needs to be greeted with sky is falling rhetoric or the discussion quickly loses its benefit.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Rogue (Forums)New Level 75 Talent
The perception was that Deadly Brew was essentially a mandatory PvP talent, which runs against our overall goal of creating choices, while at the same time being highly situational in endgame PvE.

When the new build hits the servers, take a look at the new set bonuses on the Mists PvP sets. We've added new bonuses alongside the existing ones in most cases, and for Rogues, that's where Deadly Brew has gone.

Oh okay that makes sense, but that still begs the question why remove that from PvE rogues? That entire tier has literally no options for me. The talent it self is extremely situational, however I can see its uses on boss adds that need to be burned. If you don't want to make mandatory talents why is prep still an option? Any word on how sap, blind, and gouge benefit from this talent?
A couple of points here: First off, regarding the functionality of Prey on the Weak, the primary benefit is going to come on Cheap Shot and Kidney Shot. Blind, Sap, and Gouge are included as a minor ancillary benefit -- there may be situations where you use an Incapacitate to pool energy and prepare a burst, and a bit of increased damage on your opening attack (or a teammate's Chaos Bolt...) would be helpful.

Second, regarding the usefulness of the tier as a whole in PvE, what you really are questioning is its usefulness in raiding. Any of the talents in that row are going to be quite impactful in scenarios, dungeons (and if you scoff at the idea of using any sort of crowd control in dungeons, check out our Challenge Modes), outdoor solo gameplay, etc. So let's be clear about that. But the criticism regarding raiding is a fair one.

The majority of our raid bosses do not involve enemies that can be stunned or incapacitated, and I'm not going to try to argue to the contrary. And ideally, a talent tier like the Rogue level 75 would be universally appealing, and present compelling choices, to all types of players who do all types of content. Here are three possible approaches to solving that problem:

Add a clearly raid-useful talent to the tier in place of Deadly Brew; something that increases your DPS, or gives you more movement or survivability. The problem? Every raiding rogue will take that talent, and ignore the other two.

Redesign the whole tier, moving away from a control theme entirely. The problem here is that we'd essentially be abandoning the design space of ever having talents that improve or rely upon crowd control effects.

Attempt to incorporate more opportunities for crowd-control effects and short-duration effects like Stuns and Incapacitates to shine in our raid encounters. In general, the most interesting raid encounters are the ones that involve movement, control, coordination, and aren't just a matter of making your DPS number as big as possible. We're not there yet, but I think we'd like to be.

Brewfest in Mists of Pandaria
Brewfest will be updated for Mists of Pandaria. This means that you will have approximately 10 days after the release of Mists of Pandaria to reach level 89 in order to queue for the Brewfest dungeon boss. Luckily though, a lot of the content does not have a level requirement so you will still be able to participate in a lot of the fun even if you are not level 89.

Will be Brewfest's part before 25 september be for 85; and then change for 90 levels when 25 september hits? We will not rule out the possibility of this changing, but currently the level requirements will remain the same through the entirety of the event. So you will not be able to access Coren Direbrew until Mists of Pandaria has been released. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battle Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Question about early NPC Trainer battlesThe first Trainer battle on the horde side is against a trainer who has a level 5 team (Dagara the fierce). Meanwhile on the alliance side, the first trainer battle is against a trainer with level 2 pets (Julia).
This was just a bug. The trainer levels will be mirrored on both sides in the next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Need More Level 22 PetsThere are a lot of 23 -24 level pets in cataclysm and Pandaria, and plenty of level 21 pets in Sholazar Basin. The only zones that have level 22 pets seem to be Icecrown and Stormpeaks, but there are very few to battle. Adding more pets to those zones, and/or making Mount Hyjal level 22 would help fill the gap.
We are making adjustments to the leveling flow that you should see in the next build. Should alleviate this problem. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

UI ImprovementsI just started testing pets, but one thing I noticed is that its pretty frustrating not to be able to select a pet to view their stats from the slot they occupy.
We intend to make the entire battle slot clickable to show the pet details. Should see it in a future build. (Official Forums)

PvP Vulnerability
The fact that players are vulnerable to PvP attacks while in a pet battle is intentional. However, a couple features that go along with this are not implemented yet.

First off, the exact pet you were fighting when you were broke out of pet battle will be respawned. Same quality, stats and skin color. Second, you will get a 3s damage shield that absorbs 50% of incoming damage to help negate the fact that you need time to recover after exiting the pet battle interface. Both of these will be in for the next build.

We feel its very important to keep the PvP aspect of the game intact and if you choose to play on a PvP server, you will certainly be fighting for those rare spawns. (This rule effects PVE servers as well but only in contested areas.) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Eternal Striders not in Pet JournalThe Eternal Striders in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms are able to be battled, and they are able to be trapped, but they do not show up in the pet journal at all.
It's a bug and its fixed in the next build. Thanks for the report. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Why restrict Argent Squires?I like how we can battle with Balloons but not Squires.
Balloons, Kites, Argent Squire/Gruntlings and Guild Pages/Heralds will not be able to pet battle. This may change with time, but this is the current plan. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Lack of Stable Masters in PandariaI have been all around looking for a Stable Master who can help my poor babies in Pandaria, Alas there is but one and he is VoEB
Most of these were bugged and have been fixed for the next build. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Questions about Pets I already have.If I have three of the same pets that I bought or traded for before MoP and they are not WILD Pets, would I be able to learn all three in my pet book, just like if I caught three wild pets of the same kind, or is the 3 pets maximum reserved only only for the wild pets?
Yes, you will be able to have 3 of almost every pet. Certain pets are unique since they are attached to a Wow license, granted from an achievement or earned from TCG codes. (Official Forums)

Pet Battle Zone Changedid a find pet battle in ruins of lorderon, fought, found myself in front of Stormwind being killed.
We randomize your fight location to mix it up. It's no different than queuing for a random BG/Dungeon. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Strand Crab Doesn't Count on AchievementCaught a Strand Crab and it seems to not check off on the Eastern Kingdom Safari achiev. Is there something I did wrong?
Just a bug, thanks for the report. We will get it fixed up. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Triangles in Front of NamesSo when I roll over the paw icons in my minimap, and it shows what the animal/pet/whatever is, occasionally there is one that has a triangle/arrow in front of its name pointing either up or down.
That indicates if the pet is above (like up on a hill) or below (in a cave) you. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Raid Testing Schedule - July 30-31

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

After the weekend, we will be testing a number of raid encounters, including 25-player encounters. The testing schedule for remaining Normal modes will be somewhat accelerated, since the encounters are already familiar to many testers and we are just verifying functionality and tuning.

Each encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid and subject to the realities of a beta environment. We might have to change the time of a testing session or cancel it entirely, due to bugs, builds, server hardware issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information, and thank you in advance for testing and providing feedback.

I updated the schedule slightly to space the encounters out a bit more evenly.

Our testing times are not designed to be universally convenient -- some times will be ideal for some time zones, and terrible for others, and we try to spread that out. We're not expecting people to log on at 3am local time to test a raid for an hour (though we understand that some will do so), but at the same time, a large number of North American players miss a majority of the boss times because they occur during work hours during the week, and nearly all the times are poor for Oceanic players.

The earlier times are meant to be more convenient for EU players, and the later times in each session are more convenient for NA players, while still fitting within a standard work day for the designers who need to observe their encounters for feedback and tuning purposes.

25-Heroic testing will look more like the 10-Heroic scheduling you've seen in recent weeks.

Weekend Sale – 25% Off Race Change

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Get ready for a new look. Through this weekend, and for a limited time only, you can change your World of Warcraft character’s race for 25% off the regular price!

To get started, simply click here. Alternatively, you can log in to your Battle.net account at www.battle.net, select your World of Warcraft account, and then click “Race Change” at the bottom of the page.

Don’t delay -- this offer ends Monday, July 30 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

The Daily Blink - Forum Raiders in Real LifeThe Daily Blink paints a picture of how some members of WoW live their real life!

This is an unfair strip. Even for a guy who raids casually, I find this bitter. They do have a point, they put more hours into the game, they work harder to master their class, they work harder to pave the way so to speak, and all they get is bitter mockery. I mean we're all using their tacts and theory-crafting and walkthroughs anyway. Then what is it exactly that we're so judgy all of a sudden?

Well, to be honest, the people doing the theorycrafting and the tactics couldn't give two shits about nerfing content. THe ones that cry about people killing bosses are the ones using those tactics, aka, people who think they are special snowflakes.

They should rename it the The Daily Socialist. Socialism is the new cool thing now right? It's no longer good to be different or want to achieve things. Welfare for everyone!

Nah, the next one will probably just show someone with no sense of proportion whining that game makers who design an MMO where that more people can actually enjoy content in a videogame are Socialists.

Nah, the next one will probably just show someone with no sense of proportion whining that game makers who design an MMO where that more people can actually enjoy content in a videogame are Socialists.

Nah, the next one will probably just show someone with no sense of proportion whining that game makers who design an MMO where that more people can actually enjoy content in a videogame are Socialists.

I love the daily blink. Can't stand these so-called hardcore players that seem to spend more time whinging about what OTHERS can have, than enjoying what they can have LONG before everyone else...usually, at times the "hardcore" player is more bark than bite, really.

People who play games to feel superior to other people REALLY need to get themselves something constructive to do in life. If you can't enjoy a game unless you can feel superior to others, then you shouldn't be playing games at all...you should be getting some help.

This is an unfair strip. Even for a guy who raids casually, I find this bitter. They do have a point, they put more hours into the game, they work harder to master their class, they work harder to pave the way so to speak, and all they get is bitter mockery. I mean we're all using their tacts and theory-crafting and walkthroughs anyway. Then what is it exactly that we're so judgy all of a sudden?

Even if what you said true about the hardcore players worked harder to gain the rewards and achiev and all of that stuff. They shouldn't care about if other less hardcore and casual players get the same reward later on in the future or something like that, this is not the point here the point here tbh did you enjoy it? did you enjoy being a hardcore and downed the boss and got your achievement kill date before everyone else? if yes then that's it.

That's the entire point of playing this game you play to enjoy yourself with your friends not to stalk others player to see if they did it the same as you but with less efforts because of bla bla nerfs and stuff they shouldn't care about it and they should have confident about themselves being a better player without having more rewards and shiney stuff before other players. But yeah that Daily blink is indeed funny haha.